Scouring the fallow landscape around the Llobregat river and the Rubí stream near Barcelona with her 8 x 10 camera, Janelle Lynch (born 1969) searches for evidence and omens of nature’s life cycles. Her photographs of anthropomorphized trees, walls of litter-strewn vegetation, rocks and disintegrating leaves, all taken during a four-year stay in Barcelona between 2007 and 2011, are informed by three figures whose texts are excerpted in this volume: Roland Barthes, particularly his discussion of mourning in Camera Lucida; Charles Burchfield, whose pantheistic painterly animations of landscape have much inspired Lynch; and Wendell Berry, whose essay on approaching nature with respect and humility helped to further hone her process. Barcelona is also conceived as a homage to Lynch’s grandmother, who died in 2008, and to the victims of a devastating flood in the region that occurred in 1962.

Published by Radius Books.Text by José Antonio Aldrete-Haas, Mario Bellatín.

Janelle Lynch (born 1969) explores themes of death, regeneration and preservation. Los Jardines de Mexico unites four series of photographs taken between 2002 and 2007, three from Mexico City and one from Chiapas. Simultaneously celebratory and sad, the photographs embrace loss as a necessary facilitator of growth.